


Over the Abyss

by authorperson



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: ACD Canon References, Author John, Community: sherlockbbc_fic, Disguised Sherlock, M/M, Multi, Post-Reichenbach, Reunion, Sickfic, So many Disney and Brit Lit references, The Blue Carbuncle, The Empty House, The Final Problem (Granada), The Secret Society of Baker Street Landladies, The dying detective, Violinist Sherlock, case-fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-03
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2017-11-15 12:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/527459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/authorperson/pseuds/authorperson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Almost three years after Sherlock's death, John is a best-selling author with a new book approaching publication. He is thrown head long back into the world of deduction by the murder of “thehonourable” Ronald Adair, a Sherlock Holmes conspiracy theorist, who was killed by a professional hit for no apparent reason.</p><p>While taking down the second-to-last man in the Moriarty web, meanwhile, Sherlock becomes desperately ill, and makes a mistake that costs him his identity. Frantic and hallucinating, he automatically calls John for help, unwittingly bringing Moran on to his trail.</p><p>With Schonberg and Moran each after Sherlock’s blood, and his condition deteriorating rapidly, John, Mycroft and Lestrade are in for an international race against time to keep Sherlock alive long enough to get him back from the dead.</p><p>ABANDONED GUYS SORRY</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nominal Inconsistencies

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based on several prompts from the BBC Kinkmeme, including some of my own, but the main prompt it follows can be found here: http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/17487.html?thread=105734479#t105734479

[ ](http://imgur.com/f7pZV)

 

 

 

> _The physician who killed me_   
>  _Neither bled, purged nor pilled me,_   
>  _Nor counted my pulse, but it comes to the same,_   
>  _In the height of my fever, I thought of his name ~ Nicarchus_
> 
>  

Monday, October 20, 2014

It was nearing five in the evening, and it was still blazingly hot, somehow. It had hit a high of eighty-six earlier, and had he not experienced the 60 degree weather of the past month (or been as keen an observer as he was), he could have sworn it was July, not October. The orange, slanted light glancing off the store windows opposite was the only clue to the season or the hour. Indian Summer, his neighbor Carlitos called it. Apparently, a week of this happened every year.

The heat wouldn’t last though. It was one of the strange vagaries of weather he’d had picked up on in the four weeks he’d spent as Marcus Winters. Just at dusk, the winds would come in off the ocean and drop the temperature ten degrees (he had to remember to keep in Fahrenheit, a slip like that could get people killed). As soon as it was fully dark, the temperature would ping back up, and they’d be in for another gentle Californian night.

By then, he would be on the move. Tonight, it was all ending, and thank god for that. This business had gone on far too long, with far too little to hold his interest. Two more days of lying low at his tiny apartment, and then he’d be off to New York (and one step closer to home).

(He didn’t allow himself the luxury of dwelling on such things anymore, not after the disaster that was New Zealand, but he was down to the last three. After tonight, it was just Schonberg and Moran. With any luck, he’d be home for Christmas. Or Easter. Possibly.)

Of course, inherent in the relocation was clearing out completely. In two days, Marcus Winters, the well-liked out-of-work dancer he had become for his stay in California, would be the subject of a missing person’s investigation. His apartment would be found utterly destroyed, and his distinctive, bright orange ’64 Volkswagen beetle would be discovered with not quite two pints of blood dashed all over the interior. There would be some drama in the apartment complex, but the case would run cold, and Carlitos and Joey would eventually forget about their favorite neighbor.

(The blood would be taken fresh, stolen from a convenient blood drive about a quarter of a mile distant from his decided abandonment point. He’d learned his lesson from Janus Cars, and some of the LAPD might have brains. Marcus Winters had type O-positive, he’d need to watch out for that.)

At the moment, however, Marcus’ impending disappearance was the last thing on his mind. He was waiting, camped out on a bus stop bench and ignoring every line that came past, just people watching. It was all the fun he could have on a job this dull.

The target was a six-foot-one, blond human trafficker with the incongruous name of Vargas. He might have baby-faced Hollywood looks and a guileless smile, but Vargas was utterly without scruples. His talent for secrecy enabled him to run a frighteningly efficient trade of human chattel, and made sure that his operation went mostly unnoticed by local authorities, who had only traces to go on. Very few people knew of Vargas’ existence, even in the criminal classes. He was very good at what he did.

(He himself had only found Vargas based on Irene’s old information. She’d met Vargas when she was asked to provide training in her methods to a select group of his imports. There were seven photos under his name: a client list, an order verification notice, a partial personnel file, and four of Vargas himself in varying states of debauchery. There was also a whole paragraph devoted to ‘what he liked’—light bondage, silk negligee, and to be called ‘Monsieur’ in bed, apparently.)

Compared to most of Moriarty’s left-overs, though, Vargas could hardly count. Because of his devotion to absolute secrecy, Vargas had trouble getting clients. It was the reason he had thrown his line in with Moriarty in the first place. With Moriarty gone and none of his survivors much interested in the Los Angeles sex trade, Vargas was still operating on the old contracts. It was still a lucrative business for the best trafficker in North America, but it was routine by now. The same orders, the same drop offs, and a truly startling number of humans changing hands, every detail obsessed over by Vargas and his crew. Their concentrated efforts made them go undetected by the police, but once the routes were known, they became an easy mark. None of them would be expecting a police force. (Or an assassin. And certainly not a dead one.)

Everything was set, and he just had to wait for his plans to come to fruition. Even the tricky bit on this job wouldn’t be too difficult, which was a welcome change from the norm. Detectives Rivera and Daniels might be competent, and could pose a problem to his plans, but they’d be otherwise occupied tonight.

His dealings with the police had been awkward at first. When he’d invented his Marcus Winters persona, he had intended to go after Vargas alone, so it was less professional than he would have liked. The main point of it had been to fit with the areas of town which lent themselves to the easy concealment of his target’s operations, and to make enough of a splash that the wrong people wouldn’t take a closer look. His usual method of sliding into the ranks of his targets’ thugs had been doomed to failure by Vargas’ suspicious nature, and his fall back plan of an outright attack was equally out (the location of man’s headquarters wasn’t known even by Irene). So he had improvised. He’d played up the charm, the energy, the _gay_ , and broke out the dancing talent he hadn’t touched since his mother stopped forcing the lessons on him at sixteen.

Marcus Winters took classes at the bigger studios and passed out his much-doctored resume to every one of them. He wore a lot of bright colors, cheap fabrics, and drove a car which wouldn’t hit sixty mph. He smiled a lot, put product in his bleached hair, spoke in a nasal falsetto, and made friendly conversation with his neighbors. He definitely did not take special notice of the twelve nubile females who spoke no English in the Saturday Strippercise class on Las Puentes Boulevard, or of the trio of muscle-bound men who picked them up in unsuspicious groups of four.

Still, he’d played it off well. He’d caught Detective Rivera’s attention and cemented her respect by linking four of her cold cases to Vargas’ operation after just five minutes in her office, and his overt trustworthiness and exuberance made his story of just having stumbled upon the case believable.  He also managed a certain aura of mystery that had Rivera’s young partner Daniels dreaming up romanticized tales of mob bosses and sniveling underlings, and lone, brave informants. He was fairly certain that Rivera at least knew he wasn’t exactly ‘Marcus Winters’, but she had enough appreciation for his information to believe him and follow down his leads.

Rivera and Daniels were both able enough to be worthy of his concern. It wouldn’t do for him to be caught at this stage of the game, and he was more worried about exposure by them than he was of being identified by Vargas.

(That was the beauty of his method. It had been easy to pick off the larger, savvier players during the feeding frenzy that had occupied Moriarty’s power vacuum; in the case of Sicilian di Tomas—not Catalan di Tomas—and the two Libyan branches, they’d managed to take each other out entirely on their own. Those that fell through the cracks had time to become complacent. It was the mid-level goons that had given him trouble, but he had learned, and he was healing.)

Their taskforce, on the other hand… Well. He could afford wriggle room with those idiots. They wouldn’t expect him to be able to do much more than a triple pirouette and a curtsey; he’d be able to ditch his watchdogs with ease.

Vargas was making the delivery of the twelve young women from the Strippercise class to a Nathan Kinston tonight at 11:45. It was the first opportunity he’d had to catch Vargas out in the open since he’d been here, and though it was far from ideal, he didn’t want to wait around southern California any longer than he had to. There were innocents in the way this time, and he couldn’t be bothered to think about them while he took down Vargas. That was what the police were for.

Daniels would be going after the client. Rivera, the women. There would be a perimeter to prevent escape, and Marcus would be behind that line with a pair of officers, ready to give the signal when he saw Vargas and his thugs on the approach.

That was the plan as LAPD knew it, and far be it from him to disillusion them. They didn’t want to be worried about a thirty-six-year-old unemployed dance teacher in the middle of their ambush, and he couldn’t blame them for that. They wouldn’t have one either.

(If a dead consulting detective instigated a fire fight and an unfamiliar bullet was found between Luis Vargas’ baby blues, they wouldn’t learn about it from him.) And if Marcus Winters was missing two days later, well… Informants were killed all the time. His new documentation was lined up, he had his train tickets, and Maxwell Price, Julliard drop-out, would in New York by then.

The wind kicked up, as it always did. Marcus Winters waved to a pair of fellow Pilates students as they passed on the opposite sidewalk. (He never thought of himself in his own name anymore, not even when alone. It was worth a lot more than his own life to forget his alias these days.) He checked his watch for good measure, and stood to meet them, shrugging into his chartreuse polyester shell.


	2. The Swan and Hostage

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

 

It was raining, but it was October in London, so really, John shouldn't have been surprised. Still, he couldn't help grumbling just a little as he pulled on his jacket and limped out of the flat. It was once again the utterly arbitrary fourth Thursday of the month, which meant pints with Lestrade down at the pub.

Pub nights with Greg had been Ella’s idea. Back at the beginning, when his life was over but still somehow exploding around his ears and he couldn’t do anything without a camera flashing in his face, reporters calling out to him, throwing Sherlock’s name like knives, she had told him, _just get away._ Find some time, some regular thing that gets you away from everything, away from all the ghosts. Find some time to breathe.

At the time, he hadn’t put much stock in Ella’s advice. After all, she hadn’t been able to help him before. It had taken chance, and the elemental force that was Sherlock Holmes to cure John Watson of his demons, and if Sherlock was gone now, then what hope did he have? And anyway, he couldn’t _just get away,_ not when there was an internal investigation in Scotland Yard, not when Lestrade was in danger of losing his career, not when John was still trying to work up the nerve to go back to Baker Street, not when there were millions of people out there who still believed that fucking _Moriarty_ was a fucking _invention_ , and certainly not when the only person that had ever mattered was _gone._

Sherlock died in January, twenty-four days after his thirty-third birthday. It took John five hours to leave St. Bart’s, another two for him to even begin to explain to Mrs. Hudson, and seven more before he finally passed out in his chair, exhausted. There was the funeral, the questioning, the meeting with Ella, the trip to the cemetery with Mrs. Hudson, the investigation. John was living out of a suitcase at Stamford’s and studiously ignoring his phone, his blog, his emails, the newspapers. He couldn’t remember most of it.

And then, one Thursday a month later, he’d gone out for the shopping and when he left, laden down with milk and crisps and digestives, there had been a mob. There were reporters with microphones and reporters with Dictaphones and there were flashing cameras, and TV cameras and there was a _van_ , an actual _press_ van, and they swarmed around him like bees. John hadn’t even thought about it. He’d dropped his bags and his cane and dashed off to duck into the first sheltered doorway he could find. Cursing in pain from the leg that would just _not stay healed_ without murders and indoor target practice and far too many cabs, John had blinked into the sudden dark, and been surprised to see Lestrade.

Moving on autopilot, he’d limped up behind the DI and tapped him on the shoulder. Lestrade had jumped a good three inches, and stared up at John with bruised, shining eyes.

“You look like shit,” John had said. “Mind if I join you?”

It was stilted and horrible. Lestrade was suspended, pending the investigation. John had checked out, by the way, he wouldn’t be culpable, even if… the accusations turned out to be true.

 _“Which they won’t_ ,” John had snarled.

 _“_ Of _course_ not, I’m not an _idiot,”_ Lestrade growled back. It was the first time since that day at Bart’s that anyone had spoken to him without pity, and call him a masochist, but it felt _good._

The first of Sherlock’s cases had started coming back from review. That was why Lestrade was there: they were all coming out cleared.

John had sworn and waved away a refill for their pints. Screw the beer, they needed whiskey for this conversation.

One finger: how had John been?

 _“_ Oh, you know. Alive. You?”

 _“_ Same.”

Two fingers, three. Mycroft wasn’t doing so well. He wasn’t eating; he’d lost five pounds so far, and was spending more and more time at the office. Lestrade was getting really worried about him.

John had blinked, drunk enough not to understand. “ _Mycroft?”_

“Yeah. What, he never told you? Mycroft and I have been together for nine years. ‘S how I met Sherlock.”

 _“_ Oh,” John had said, because, really, what else was there to say?

The next day, John woke up with his worst hangover since his early days at Bart’s, and feeling better than he had since January. He moved back to Baker Street.

The pub was called the Swan and Hostage, and yes, John saw the irony in that all too clearly. It was a smelly, skinny stretch between two larger buildings, and it was far enough away from their usual haunts that nobody they knew would ever find them. The bartender, Pete, was half deaf and generous with his peanuts, and in mid-March, Lestrade texted John to invite him down again. It’s dark, ramshackle interior swallowed them up every time, absorbed them right into its hand-oiled woodwork and just for a bit, they could both let go.

The Swan became their place. It took them in when the pro-Sherlock graffiti campaign swept over London. It took them in when the techs found a six minute audio file on Sherlock’s phone that started with the Bee Gees and ended with a gunshot. It took them in when the official court ruling came back, the one that proved Sherlock innocent of all charges and posthumously condemned Moriarty to five consecutive life sentences. It took them in when Mycroft finally broke, when he screamed in his sleep and sobbed for his little brother, and Lestrade stayed up with him all night. It took them in when Mycroft approached John, looking a shadow of his former self, and asked him to write Sherlock’s story.

Not everything that happened down at the pub was maudlin. Somewhere around the first anniversary, John started calling Lestrade ‘Greg’ outside the Yard again, and their meetings evolved into a monthly thing. They still gravitated there when something big happened, like when John’s book hit shelves, or when they aired ‘ _The Sherlock Holmes Story’_ on telly for the second anniversary of his death, but most months, it was just beer and maybe a game. John's relationship with Greg hit a certain stride, a skewed definition of normality, for which John couldn't help but be grateful.

It took him a while to realize that he’d accidentally fallen into Ella’s advice, that he’d found some regular thing that got him away, and that it had _worked_. And if ‘getting away’ happened to entail drinks and conversation with a homocide DI who happened to be the civil partner of his own dead flatmate's brother... well. What Ella didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

They had never quite grown out of the awkwardness that had plagued them from the beginning, however. Some ever-present part of John, no matter how much he had moved on from blood on the pavement, would always go back to that heavy, broken man he’d been on his first night in the Swan, and John knew that Greg felt the same. Even now, going on three years from that first, stilted night, it still took them a while to drop the burdens of their outside lives and settle into the easy camaraderie they had come to expect from their Thursdays.

John stepped out of the October rain, nodded to Pete, and fell heavily onto the stool beside Greg without looking at him. Greg slid his eyes subtly in John’s direction.

“How’s the leg?”

John hooked his cane over the edge of the bar, and cleared his throat. “Same as ever. How’s the missus?”

Greg ducked his chin with a smile, and turned his gaze back to the bar top in front of him. “Same as ever.” He took a distracted gulp of his pint and swallowed heavily. “Oh, he wanted me to tell you, that latest draft of the Baskerville book got cleared.”

 “Oh, really?” John’s pint arrived; John just blinked at it. “The publishers will be glad to hear that.” He snatched up his mug and raised it in a jaunty salute to the conspicuous camera over the register. Greg snorted. John covered his sniggering with a drink.

“Give me something to tell the folks on Bookclub, too,” he said when he’d finished.

“Oh yeah, I heard about that,” said Greg, glancing over with a slight frown. “When are you on?”

“Well, I’m recording next week, but it won’t air until November.” Greg nodded his understanding, and dropped his eyes again.

Silence, though not an uncomfortable one. John had never bothered to find out what the Swan had on tap, but it wasn’t horrible, whatever it was. He slurped the foam off the head of his beer, and rolled it over his tongue contemplatively. Not bad at all.

After a minute, Greg grinned. “Suppose it’s too late to get tickets.”

“Oh, God, Greg,” John growled good-naturedly, spinning his glass with a finger. “Don’t even get me started.”

Greg was very clearly trying not to laugh. “The fans that bad, huh?”

“Mm,” John agreed. “Worse, if you can believe it. I heard the entire audience was booked within two hours of the announcement—and no one can convince me that a once-monthly Radio Four program has that many people clamoring for seats.”

Greg just shook his head, shoulders shaking with silent laughter. “Let’s just hope for my sake that you don’t have many of Sherlock’s ‘catch me before I kill again’-type fans. Got enough on at the moment without a rash of grade-A nutters trying to copycat Moriarty.”

“Ha.” It was all John could manage. “God knows we don’t need that.”

He drained his beer in one go, and replaced the emptied glass precisely on the bar top. Greg very diligently did not look at him.

_Steady on now, Watson. You’re not thinking about that tonight._

When he had his thoughts back under control, John cleared his throat. “Keeping busy down at the Yard, then?” he asked.

“Heh. Are we ever.” It was Greg’s turn to drain his glass. He placed his empty close to John’s, two messed up men and their matching pints. The frothy bubbles sliding down the side of Greg’s had already settled in John’s. “Some bastard’s been killing homeless in the tube stations up and down the Bakerloo line. Decapitations; nasty business. Three of them now, poor sods. Surprised you haven’t heard of it, actually.”

John’s head jerked up sharply. “Homeless? Not—“

“No, nobody off the Network. As far as I know, anyway. ‘S difficult to tell for sure.” Greg caught Pete’s eye across the bar, and tapped a finger on his glass. “Still, the killer’s not been careful about it; the idiot did this last one within view of two witnesses. Sherlock could have solved it drugged out of his mind and sick in bed.”

John mashed his lips together and blinked twice. Pete thudded down their new glasses none too gently, sloshing a bit of John’s over the side, and cleared away the empties. The foam slid slowly down the slanted side of John’s glass. John watched it all the way.

“I miss him,” said John.

“Me, too,” said Greg.

The silence was back, and this time it wasn’t quite so comforting. The television was too quiet to hear over the rain, and John didn’t bother looking up to see what was on. Outside, a car door slammed, and a shout of greeting rang through the closed doors.

“We done?” asked John quickly.

“Definitely,” returned Greg, just as fast.

John turned to face Greg fully for the first time since he’d arrived, and held up his glass with a grin. “Happy almost-Halloween, by the way.”

Greg’s answering smile softened his whole face. “Too right,” he replied, and matched John’s glass with a teasing clink. When they’d both sipped and swallowed, he frowned. “There a game on, tonight?”

John’s reply—“I dunno, should be,”—was summarily drowned by the loud entrance of six, muscly men in their mid-twenties, every one of them decked out in the colors of the Bedford Blues. Their leader, already smashed by the smell of him, let out a hoot of raucous laughter and clapped John and Greg round their backs with such force that they both lost their hold on their glasses. Then there were apologies, and _oh gosh, lemme get you fellas another,_ and calls for _round’s on me, mates_! and _turn up the telly, will you?_ and just like that, the rest of the night was lost to beer and rugby.


	3. Concerts in the Park

Monday, October 27, 2014

 

Marcus Winters, rest his soul, might have thrived there, but Maxwell Price wasn’t built for Los Angeles. He was a city boy, born and bred, and in his opinion, LA was less a city than a sprawling, haphazard mash of humanity and highways. He hated the decentralization of it, the strange lack of cabs, the excessively unpredictable public transit, and the necessity of keeping a car. (It was an opinion he shared with a deceased consulting detective from London.)

New York, though. That was Maxwell’s kind of place. There were trees that weren’t palms, and a real, singular downtown, and—wonder of wonders—a _subway_ system. There were cabs, too, of course, zipping about, bright yellow and anonymous, but Maxwell didn’t have that kind of money.

(That was the largest problem, he had found, with being dead. The job went easier when he had money. Risk of identification went down with better quality forgeries and makeup; stress of exposure went down with secured living spaces; time between targets went down when he didn’t have to rely on hitchhiking and other sub-par methods of travel—the pack mules of Brazil came to mind. He absolutely refused to compromise his secrecy simply for funds, though, even if it meant his job was that much harder. There were lives at stake, and he’d made do on the streets before.)

It wasn’t as though he was entirely penniless, in any case. Maxwell had enough cash from his recently deceased Uncle Devon (read: from raiding a cartel bank in Venezuela) to slide into the attic room of a tiny brownstone, theoretically just outside Harlem, which he had agreed to rent month-to-month. The trio of tight knit friends who owned the house ignored him for the most part, which suited Maxwell fine. He wore a lot of comfortable, baggy clothing from thrift-shops. For everything else, he had his violin.

The violin had been a real find, on sale in a closing music store back in California. He’d spotted it about two weeks into his stint as Marcus Winters, battered and gummy with dust from having lain idle too long. It wasn’t the highest quality instrument, and its bow was badly worn from having been left too tight too long, but the sight of it had stirred something in him. It was the first violin he’d seen since taking out a prominent immigration officer who had been in Moriarty’s pocket whilst in disguise as an usher at the Paris Opera, back at the beginning of this mess. The idea of a violin had slotted into his next persona, still in development at the time, and refused to move, so he’d gone back to the shop in utter secrecy to purchase the instrument, and had buried it in the back of Marcus Winters’ extensive closet until his departure for New York.

(The violin had taken the money he had meant to use for New York’s supply of coloured contacts. For Maxwell Price, he had gone with chemically straight black hair, so short it stuck upward when he left it alone and a latex appliance which hooked his nose into an aquiline beak. His eyes, originally supposed to have been brown, he covered instead with a pair of thick-rimmed prescription-less glasses. He’d had to call his forger in a hurry to correct his papers, but it had been worth it. The soreness in his fingers and shoulders was easily ignored for the joy of an arc of maple against his skin and the trembling float of resin dust off his strings. Three years was a long time, and it had taken a few hours of straight trial and error to work the rust off; however much the muscle memory was still there, the calluses certainly weren’t.)

Maxwell played wherever he could—subway stations and street corners, so far, but never the same ones twice. The variety served a three-fold purpose. It kept Maxwell from being run off by territorial fellow buskers. It kept him from succumbing to boredom. Best of all, though, it gave him _information._

The target here in New York was Christopher Schonberg. He was in the unorthodox business of goods-laundering, and had once been a vital part of some of Moriarty’s biggest schemes. When a theft was committed, or a forgery done, the dangerously traceable items would go to Schonberg. From there, his complex hierarchy of professional thieves, pawn shop owners and appraisers would run the contraband through a sort of up-scale chop shop, exchanging the stolen goods for either equal value or equal appearance. The clients would get equivalence, and the stolen or fraudulent items would be found with people entirely unconnected to the original crime.

Schonberg’s name had first cropped up in connection Ms. Wenceslas’ Argentinian forger, but deeper digging at a later date had revealed a much more far-reaching operation. Schonberg was cut of Moriarty’s cloth, in that very little of his operation could be traced all the way back to him, but he was nowhere near Moriarty’s level. His bottom-rung minions were ever being caught in connection to mysterious break-ins, during which priceless diamonds and other valuables would be moved about, but nothing would ever be stolen. Local police knew something was going on, and had at one point been on the verge of capturing some of the mid-level members of the gang, but Schonberg’s sudden downsizing of operations in connection to Moriarty’s death had foiled NYPD’s efforts.

For Maxwell’s purposes, Schonberg was as close to a perfect target as it was possible to find. The constant turn-over of Schonberg’s grunt workers made him an easy mark for infiltration (his favorite method), and if he was very careful (which, of course, he was) he could have most of the gang demolished by the legitimate police before taking out Schonberg personally. Best of all, though, was that he didn’t know quite where to find him.

It was a delicate balance, this game. On the one hand, too little information left him floundering for weeks in search of one tiny lead. On the other, as had happened in Los Angeles, he might still spend weeks, waiting for information to come to fruition, but without any effort on his part. Each extreme was dull and tedious in its own right. This job, though, was perfect.

That was where the busking came in. The best part about cities was their activity; millions of people crammed on top of one another in the span of a few square miles made for massive amounts of humanity buzzing past. With an organization the size of Schonberg’s, he was guaranteed to run into a member soon enough, (and he was more than confident that he could identify them). He hadn’t found any yet, but he’d only been at it three days. Maxwell wouldn’t normally have succumbed to boredom so easily; he was a patient sort (but he wasn’t the one in control). It was time for the next step. Today, he was playing Central Park.

Maxwell hadn’t initially been sure what to expect, but Central Park had more than lived up to its reputation. He’d arrived early in the morning to find a good spot, and had been stunned by both the space and the number of people traversing the park even at that early hour. There were fallen leaves strewn everywhere, the not-yet-barren limbs of trees clacking against each other in the wind, joggers and bicyclists making their tracks in the dirt paths, and, about twenty minutes after his arrival, a young, pink-haired guitarist who eyed up his violin case from afar, and turned down a different path.

He found a set of planters near enough to the edge of the park to be seen by passerby from the city, but far enough away that the sound of traffic wouldn’t overwhelm him. The planters were raised about two feet off the ground, and Maxwell laid open his case at the base of one, and seeded it with five dollars in change and three rumpled bills. He tightened the bow, tested the tuning, and began _._

He ignored the early morning joggers, with their earbuds in and turned up full blast so that even he could hear them over his own music, and, for lack of a better word, played. He tried to match a leaf as it fell off a branch overhead, or to narrate the drama of a businessman late for work on the edge of the park. He took advantage of the bow’s tendency to squeak and tried to emulate a bird in the upper registers, fingers high up on the fingerboard, close to the bridge. He eventually got tired of foolishness and indulged in unconventional classical works, transposing cello pieces from memory, and sliding his way through a bit of Gershwin that meant to be for piano. No one complained.

Around eleven, when the lunch crowd started to trickle in, he turned his attention to his audience. It was different, playing for money as opposed to playing for friends (or for thinking), but he enjoyed it. That stockbroker (left handed, single father of one, a teenage daughter) was the sort who favored Mozart, and Maxwell was left the remains of a ten dollar bill after coffee and a sandwich. That television executive was a fan of the opera to go by the tickets in her purse; some Verdi played for her gained him five dollars. That mother of two (sells what she calls ‘vintage’ clothing online) would appreciate a Disney tune. (If nigh on three years of global travel was good for one thing, it was that his knowledge of popular culture had expanded to an unprecedented degree. When he got home, he’d have to ask—)

(He could _not_ be thinking like that. Ever. And his was another name that he never allowed himself to think anymore.)

From twelve thirty to two, he ran a steady business with the virtuoso pieces, showing off his fingering and speed in a way that his poorly strung bow really wasn’t up to. He took care to empty his case periodically, but only in between crowds, and only to a degree—some money left there would let people know he was worth stopping for. At two, he broke out the modern arrangements for the after-school crowd, but while they were enthusiastic listeners, he didn’t gain much coin from them.

At about three, it hit him that they were nearing Halloween. A group of small children with their grandparents hurtled by, carrying tiny pumpkins the size of apples, and settled in for a picnic across from his planter. Maxwell turned to the spooky. He made ghostly sounds on his violin, gliding seamlessly up and down the E string, and slid into a thin, only somewhat unsatisfying rendition of Night on Bald Mountain, before building into Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries—utterly inadequate without the pervasive French horn of the original, but what could he do? Midway through _Skeletons_ from Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, the grinning grandfather pressed a quarter into each of the five children’s hands, and they shyly trotted over to plonk them in his case. Maxwell smiled at them, and started in on _Danse Macabre._

By the time the piece had run its course, from witch’s brew, to ghosts, to a mad flight of bats and vampires, the children and their minders had left. In the music, the sun rose, scaring all the creatures of the night to their hiding places. He drew the final note and the bow right off the strings and let them both hang there.

Not a bad day. No sign of any of Schonberg’s operatives, but they’d be out later than this, he’d expect. All right time for a break.

Maxwell huffed out a smile, and let his arms drop.

“You’re pretty good,” said a voice.

Maxwell spun, both hands rising defensively without a thought to the instrument clutched between them. There was a man standing not two yards behind him and to his left (height five-foot-seven, weight one eighty… four, mid to late twenties, blond, pale skin, clean blue jeans, sweater with Halloween motif, whole stance trying to proclaim ‘relaxed’ and failing utterly).

“Oh,” said Maxwell. The man was smiling up at him (shyly? nervously? he couldn’t tell), neck craned, eyes squinted against the sun. Maxwell relaxed his grip on his violin and, (with effort), smiled back affably. “Thank you.”

When the man made no other move, Maxwell turned again and stepped neatly off his perch, folding the violin and bow under his arm. He squatted low and picked up his violin case to the top of the planter, making a show of sweeping together the assorted bills and coins, and watched the man surreptitiously over the corner of his glasses. The stranger scuffed the sole of one shoe (Adidas, about two years old, not well cared for, though well loved) aimlessly against the dirt. Definitely nerves, then, but why?

“D’you… play here often?” he asked hesitantly. (Former stutterer.)

Maxwell raised himself up on his thighs to wedge his earnings in with the others in the pocket of his jeans, and picked up his head to look at the man dead on. The man’s hand (right-handed) tightened around his mobile, and he squashed his lower lip through his teeth, eyes deliberately not meeting Maxwell’s. (Internally, his eyes narrowed.)

“Often as I can,” Maxwell lied breezily. _His_ posture screamed ‘relaxed’ the correct way.

The man’s hand clenched on his phone again (a ‘brick’ phone, impossible to see brand from this angle, likely one-time-use, pay as you go, similar to his own), and his roving eyes swung back around to Maxwell’s violin case.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” He was trying _very_ hard to sound casual. Externally, Maxwell’s eyes narrowed.

(Light build, takes small strides for height, stands with head canted forward, shoulders up, nervous: on a mission. Convulsively grasping phone, not likely to be for personal use—clothes fit well, wouldn’t have a one-off phone—yes, bulge in jeans suggesting nicer personal phone: mission for employer. Eyes keep coming back to violin: employer needs violinist? Better ways of finding violinists than sending fools like this one to scout Central Park: employer needs street performer. Employer needs _street_ _violinist_ _in Central Park tomorrow._ Why? Back to man: Chain smoker, in a long-term monogamous relationship with a very short woman: probably irrelevant. Profession??)

When Maxwell didn’t say anything for a moment, the man cleared his throat. “It’s just, my girlfriend is coming in from out of town, and she likes the violin, so…”

(A lie: he just saw his girlfriend, dentition marks on left side below jaw still forming.)

“Try around four,” cut in Maxwell without inflection. He forced a grin. The man smiled back with an unconscious sigh of relief.

“Around four, okay, great!” he enthused, backing away from Maxwell, already bringing the work phone up to dial a number. He lifted it rapidly to his ear, and raised a hand in farewell to Maxwell. “That’s great. Thank you!”

Maxwell lifted a reciprocal hand, and returned his attention to his violin. He nestled it carefully into its case, taking care not to make any noise, not bothering to watch the man leave. He didn’t need to.

“Gabe?” said the man’s retreating voice. It didn’t go very far; only to the street corner. If Maxwell didn’t breathe, he could still make out every word. “Yeah, I found one. Violinist, like you said, Central Park, plays on the planters on the west side. No, by 100th. Yep, said he’d be here tomorrow, four pm. Get this: he matches your description, too. I know… You should give me a raise. ‘Course I wasn’t suspicious. I’m going to have to bring Cassidy, though, I told him it was for my girlfriend. Yeah. Nah, it should be fine. Hang on, ride’s here.”

Maxwell kept his head lowered, but lifted his gaze over the top of his useless glasses in time to see the man duck into the front seat of a car (silver Honda, about five years old, license X93-JOP, New York plates), and to catch a glimpse of the back of the driver’s head (just a bundle of pale brown curls. The short girlfriend, Cassidy?). He watched as the car drove off, until he couldn’t without being obvious.

That had been… unexpected. Data. Possible Schonberg organization encounter? Maxwell needed to do some research. This was good.

(It was difficult calling anything ‘good’ anymore. He was dismantling a global criminal empire, had ensured prison time for countless thugs and operatives, while putting bullets in just the right brains to keep a web of that magnitude from ever rising again. He’d been at it three years by now, and wanted like he’d never wanted anything to see London again, but he was under constant threat of the loss of everything, should he be discovered, and so he couldn’t dare. He was down to the last two, but one of them was _Moran_ , who had held laser sights on him at the Pool, and had been there to witness his fall; who had nearly caught him _four times_ , even when he’d been at his most careful, so the number hardly mattered, not when Moran was going to take months of work to track down, and he hadn’t even started _._ In the rare times he let himself contemplate it, there was nothing about this job that was anywhere close to ‘good’.)

(But when he did it properly, when he cleared his mind of everything but the current target, and the current plan, and didn’t think of England…)

Maxwell snapped his violin case closed.


	4. Radio Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The format of this is a little odd. Bear with me. Also, this chapter includes the single most mild case of RPF in the history of the world.

**TRANSCRIPT FOR CONTROLLER APPROVAL**

**Programme:** Bookclub **  
Recording Date:** Tuesday, October 28, 2014   
  
**Warnings:** Strong Language

**START TRANSCRIPT**

**James** **Naughtie:**

Hello, and welcome to Bookclub, which this month takes a turn for the mysterious as we follow an enigmatic genius into the dark world of London’s criminal underbelly. Written as an interconnecting cycle of five novellas, John Watson’s semi-fictitious autobiography, _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_ , starts when our author meets Sherlock Holmes, the famed consulting detective, and becomes inescapably drawn into a madcap dash to stop a killer cabbie. With barely a pause for breath, the pair turn their deductive talents against a Chinese smuggling ring, and race against the clock to stop a bomber terrorizing London. There we discover the volatile Moriarty, his invisible hand in every case, forcing the entire book toward its inevitable conclusion. Along the way, Sherlock and John grow closer, sharing responsibilities for their clients, their suspects and the shopping. As John reaches out to his sphinxlike flatmate, we wait on tenterhooks as Sherlock’s barriers start to crumble, leading him to folly at the hands of a dangerous, beautiful woman. In the end, though, some problems are too big for even Sherlock Holmes to fix, and through no fault of his own, Sherlock finds himself the suspect of fraud and felony. Fickle public opinion turns on a dime, proving the dastardly Moriarty a master of his trade, and pushing Sherlock to his ultimate death.

Despite his superhuman abilities and larger-than-life adventures, Sherlock shares a very grounded friendship with his biographer. That personal connection is highlighted eloquently by Watson’s conversational language, which still manages a staggering level of detail that will appeal to any mystery buff. Though it has spent less than a year on bookshelves, _The Adventures_ have already garnered a large fanbase of devoted followers, and was nominated for both the Richmond Mystery Prize and Howard Kyle Award for Non-Fiction. It’s no wonder that _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_ have been described by critics as the greatest work of true-crime storytelling of the last decade.

John Watson, welcome to Bookclub.

 **John Watson:**   
  
Yes, thank you. It’s good to be here.

**James Naughtie:**

Now, I think the first thing I have to ask is about that really intriguing description of your book: “semi-fictitious autobiography”.

**John Watson:**

(Laughter) Yep. Yes.

**James Naughtie:**

What do you mean by that? How much of it is fictitious?

**John Watson:**

Well, most of the names aren’t real, beyond myself and Sherlock, of course. None of the victims or suspects are identified by name. Some of them have even had their race or gender changed, for anonymity. Of course, the first thing I did when I started this project, even before deciding which cases to write up, was to contact as many of the characters as I could—or their relatives, in the case of the victims—for their permission. It was very important to me that this be above board, and, most of all, respectful.

The Scotland Yard characters are also given pseudonyms. Ah, the one question I get asked all the time is about DI Gregson, so let me just say: there is no Detective Inspector Gregson at Scotland Yard. There is a Gregson who works at the Met, but she’s the gun master for the firing range, and I wasn’t at all thinking about her when I named my character. The name just popped into my head. That doesn’t really count as fictitious, though, that’s just me not wanting to be sued.

(scattered audience laughter)

 _Scandal_ , though, is where that description really comes into play, obviously. I wanted to write that story, because I felt it showed a side of Sherlock that most of the public had never seen before, as well as being a continuation of the Moriarty storyline, but I had to fight to get approval for that one. There was some serious trouble with the Official Secrets Act, as any past readers of my blog will know—yes, I see a few nodding heads out there, hello!—but I switched some things around, and made up some others, and they were finally happy with it. The main points of the story, the interaction between Sherlock and Irene, though, that all happened.

**James Naughtie:**

If you had so much trouble getting your book approved for publication, why did you go through with it?

**John Watson:**

Well, actually, that’s a funny story that involves my punching a certain ‘minor government official’ on the nose, and that I have been warned that I must never, ever tell.

(audience laughter)

Seriously though, it was Crofton who gave me the idea. He pushed me into it, really, which is why I made sure I pushed back as much as I could to get the story told the right way. I said, if you want me to tell Sherlock’s story, then you have to let me do it as I see fit. It took some doing, but he agreed in the end.

**James Naughtie:**

Let me bring the audience in now. Why do you think _The Adventures_ have made such a big impact, as opposed to other detective stories—even other true-crime stories?

**Audience Member:**

I think it has to do with the themes of humanity, which you keep coming back to: that all the suspects, all the murderers, all the victims are human. That you’re human, and Sherlock is especially human, even when he’s not on the outside. It makes the highs and lows of the story that much sharper, which is different from the usual CSI shows that are so popular. I just wanted to ask, was it a conscious decision to tell your story like that?

**John Watson:**

Well, I could tell you the publicity lines about how the _Adventures_ tell the true story, and refute all that garbage that was thrown around two years ago, right after Sherlock died, but the book isn’t really about that. I already have my justice. Sherlock was exonerated; everybody knows the real story, for Christ’s sake it was on the telly when it happened, and then again on that special back in January for the anniversary. Richard Brook was a fraud, Moriarty was real, I believe in Sherlock Holmes.

(audience applause)

Thank you. I mean, they’re Twitter hash tags!

(laughter)

I don’t need to tell that story. Everybody knows that story; the story of the heroic detective, the internet sleuth in the funny hat—it’s a deerstalker, by the way, and yes, Sherlock stole it from a costume shop in a theater in Kensington. It’s like you said, that story would be a CSI show. Sherlock’s not television. He was a living, breathing, truly brilliant man who never did the dishes, and I feel so privileged to this day to have known him. I just wanted to tell the story of my crazy flatmate.

**Audience Member:**

Most of your book is told chronologically, except for the last two chapters. Sherlock’s death scene is horrifying, and confusing, and you write it out in really frightening detail. And then you turn around and give us that bare-bones transcript of his final moments, the conversation with Moriarty on the roof. Of course, there’s the plain, practically bullet-points denouement afterward, but that doesn’t soften the blow at all. What made you decide to end your book that way?

**John Watson:**

It’s important to remember that _The Adventures_ are an autobiography first. However much they might read like detective stories, they actually happened, and they actually happened _to me._ The entire book is chronological from my perspective, and it was just as you say: horrifying, confusing, and in really frightening detail. Sherlock is _dead_. He’s not some character; he was my best friend, and he bought the milk sometimes, and he made me a better person. My best friend committed suicide, and he made me watch. That was how it felt.

It wasn’t for another three months that we found out what happened on that roof. By then, the accusations against Sherlock had mostly fallen apart. Case after case kept coming back, exactly the way he said. Hell, Sherlock solved cases that went back twenty years, huge government conspiracies, international smuggling rings. There was no way he made all that up. It was a disturbing time for us, and especially for Donaldson and Andrews, and the other people who had doubted him. The newspapers had started printing retractions already, and there was a lot of confusion, because Sherlock wasn’t the type.

It was suggested to me initially that he killed himself out of guilt, but once the truth started coming back that made even less sense than it had originally. Then, later, the theory was that he couldn’t take being seen as a fraud when he wasn’t one, but that wasn’t Sherlock either. He genuinely didn’t care if people had confidence in him, as long as he had confidence in himself and his work. So why had he done it?

And then the techs got that recording off his phone, and everything made so much sense.

**Audience Member:**

It seems from your book that, despite their antagonistic relationship, Sherlock and Mr. Myers truly cared for each other. Their relationship went beyond what I would think was ‘normal’ for an agent of the government and a particularly useful consultant, and it was obvious that Moriarty knew that. So, why do you think that there wasn’t a sniper on Mr. Myers?

**John Watson:**

I firmly believe that Crofton and Sherlock viewed each other as brothers. Obstinate, warring brothers, with incredible amounts of power and genius on both sides, but brothers nonetheless. I never actually learned the exact circumstances of their meeting, but I know that they had been working together for long before either myself or Gregson had ever met Sherlock. You’re right that they cared for each other, deep down, and it’s obvious that they were, at one time, extremely close. It’s the reason that Crofton’s betrayal of Sherlock’s trust in chapter forty-five really sickens a lot of people, myself included, and it’s why Crofton... Well, he took Sherlock’s death very hard.

As for the absence of a sniper, do you really need to ask? Crofton Myers is a very high ranking member of our government. It would be impossible to get salmonella-infested eggs into his breakfast, much less to get him into a sniper’s sights. That didn’t stop Crofton from asking himself that same question many times in the immediate aftermath, but Gregson and I eventually knocked some sense back into him.

**Audience Member:**

Your publisher announced yesterday that you have a new Sherlock Holmes book coming out in the near future. I know we’re supposed to be discussing _The Adventures_ , but I was hoping you could explain what your book is going to be about, especially since you already covered Sherlock’s death.

**John Watson:**

That’s a good question. I have a lot of material that I didn’t cover in _The Adventures._ Sherlock and I lived together for two years, and we took an average of two cases per week. You’ve only seen five of those. Now, granted, those five were significant ones, because they were all tied up in Moriarty’s machinations, but not all the crime in London is perpetrated by one man, no matter how vast his organization, and not all the cases we took were in London. I obviously can’t give too much away, but I’m sure I can tell you something without getting in trouble.

(audience laughter)

Let me see… Well, it takes place in Dartmoor, and it’s less a detective story than it is a psychological thriller. Past followers of my blog might be able to recognize it from that description, but let me tell you, there is so much more to the story than what I put in my blog all those years ago. This is another one which runs into the Official Secrets Act, but I just got word from Crofton’s people that my latest revision _finally_ meets their approval, as far as not giving away anything too important. So be on the lookout.

**James Naughtie:**

Well, we’ll look forward, then, to further tales of your adventures. John Watson, thank you very much for being this month’s guest on Bookclub, and to our panel of readers joining us here. Remember, if you’d like to come to one of our recordings, you can log on to the BBC website. You can also find details there on the next titles in our Bookclub series, if you’d like to read along with us, which I hope you do. Until next month, and the next book, goodbye.

**END TRANSCRIPT**

**PROGRAMME APPROVED BY CONTROLLER**

**Air Date:** Sunday, November 30, 2014


	5. Playacting

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

 

Maxwell had been playing in the park for going on nine hours, but he hadn’t earned a cent. This wasn’t surprising; he was in a remarkably atonal mood. The two people who had braved some degree of proximity to ask about his screeching were told that he was composing. (Helped him think.)

What meager research he had managed into the affair of the two-phoned former stutterer with the short girlfriend—most likely ‘Cassidy’— the ‘ride’ with the brown-haired driver and the street-violinist-in-Central-Park-requiring employer—possibly called Gabe—had turned up nearly nothing. This wasn’t surprising, either, but it was infuriating in the extreme. The connections he was attempting to draw were nebulous at best, especially with nothing to go on but an odd request and (of all plebeian things) a _hunch._

(Another concession to the job, that. More than once in the past two-years-eight-months-and-twenty-nine-days-exactly, giving in to instincts and following them down had led to surprisingly satisfactory results. As he had always been forced to do for his deductions, he was careful to back up his instincts with hard evidence; they were, of course, rarely wrong. The period between ideogenesis and confirmation, though, was loathsome.)

Maxwell pinched out a pair of tinny squeaks far too close to the bridge and stared balefully down at the speckling of notes on his improvised staff paper. It was a sorry excuse for nine hours of composition, but he’d managed a passable theme, even through his impatience. If he tried, he could probably pass it off as seasonal; late October was, after all, associated with yowling and moaning and other such typically undesirable onomatopoeia.

With a sigh that puffed out into a remarkably visible cloud for the hour, Maxwell set his violin aside and pushed himself to his feet, muscles protesting too many hours spent seated on hard, cold ground. He shook out his long limbs, batting at his greying jeans to remove the leafy crumbs that stuck to him, and his wrists and neck and spine cracked loudly back into place. He had to smother a wince as his left psoas pulled stiffly. (He’d wrenched it severely running from the overzealous Tijuana Border Patrol back in September, and going from the 80s of California to the 40s of New York had done it no favors. On the bright side, the hip injury had lent credence to his out-of-work dancer persona, but Marcus’ month of dancing hadn’t allowed it much of a chance to heal.)

Sketching a facsimile of a compensative exercise another man had learned in LA, Maxwell ducked toward the ground and gathered his instrument from its momentary resting place. He tightened his bow and clucked at it sadly. The thing was of very poor quality, and really not built for the work he was putting it through; he tugged out a few broken horsehairs and re-rosined it. Quite the pair they made, Maxwell and his violin, falling to pieces together.

(Christ, when had he gotten maudlin? This ‘Maxwell’ persona was quite self-deprecating, apparently. He could work with that. _If_ his quarry ever showed up.)

Maxwell took a glance at his watch, and another behind him, scanning the park for his prey. It was pushing three now, and still no sign. He would have expected them by now, even if they were only possible low-level members of second-string organization. Shrugging a scrap of his sweatshirt’s hood onto his shoulder for padding, he settled his instrument under his jaw and plucked up his bow. Speaking of second string… He rolled his wrist and began to play.

Scales and arpeggios. A folk dance and one of his own minuets. The soaring theme of an in-flight movie he’d caught between Sydney and Lima. Three fifteen; a smiling, elderly couple slowed their pace to listen, much to the chagrin of their Lhasa Apso. They were gone before he could begin their favored Schubert. He played it anyway, and some Mendelssohn besides. Three thirty, now. Still Mendelssohn. A transposition of _Songs Without Words_ book five, piano on the violin. He moved on to Bach. Three forty-five. Sonata number two in A minor. Two roller-bladers, a bicyclist, and three dollars in change, roughly. Four ten. He dropped his instrument from his shoulder and tossed his bow in an arc, grip flipping from frog to tip, using the motion to disguise a scan of the park. Former-stutterer and his short girlfriend were nowhere to be found. He twiddled it back and began again.

Sonata number one, G minor. A pair of joggers (Broadway hopefuls, both, though only the brunette had any real chance, to judge from her lung capacity). And then, in a fit of whimsy: partita number one.

It was as though he had summoned them out of the earth. Not three minutes in to the _Allemanda_ , the same silver car slid past, going exactly at the speed limit (quite reckless of them—nobody matched the speed limit that well). Maxwell gave no outward sign of having seen it.

(’08 Accord, plates registered to a Marissa Faulkner of the Catskills—at least some of his overnight research had borne fruit. Windows un-tinted—not a get-away car, strike against being a direct Schonberg connection there. Three occupants, backseat passenger impossible to make out at this distance. Driver: Female, approximately twenty two years of age; multiple ear piercings; brown hair; height and weight impossible to determine; same driver as before; likely too tall to be the girlfriend. Front passenger: Former-stutterer.)

He stopped the partita (a fit of pique; let Johann Sebastian be appalled), and knelt to his open case, feigning bow trouble (not much of an exaggeration). Making his movements deliberate and unhurried, he removed his rosin and rag from the compartment in his case and loosened the bow’s horsehair. He ran the rag gently along the hair, forcing the loose ones away from the bundle, and making the mess look worse than it was. He needed to be accessible, lure them into a conversation, and he’d have plenty to do while he did it.

Maxwell sat back against his tree, violin cradled in his crossed legs, snipping at the fallen bow hairs with nail clippers. The wind threw a circle of fallen leaves into the air, and Maxwell shivered in his sweatshirt. The sun was setting fast; what light there was came in at a shadow-lengthening tilt and the odd, over-sensitive street light had already winked on. He’d need his jacket soon.

Footsteps on the path. Maxwell did not look up.

“Bow trouble, there, Mr…?” asked that same, hesitant voice. (Former stutterer: crisp black jeans, same Adidas, black jacket this time. Bundle of nerves, too, from that waver.)

“Maxwell,” declared Maxwell, with a smile, staring up at his new audience. “Well, I say ‘Mr Maxwell’; it’s actually ‘Mr. Price’, but s’better to call me Maxwell. You’re more likely to get an answer.” His smile widened, and slid a doe-eyed glance over the tops of his glasses. “Been expecting you two. Glad you could make it. A guy’s flattered when he’s asked to play for a pretty lady.”

The girlfriend (not the driver. Height five-foot-one, taking into account the heeled shoes, weight one-twenty to one-twenty-five, estimation obscured by coat. Approximately 25 years of age, caramel skin, straight black hair, remarkably long—Pacific Islander origin likely) laughed, delightedly. (Wide smile, no nerves; doesn’t know about boyfriend’s ‘mission’?)Former-stutterer, already holding her hand, unconsciously entwined his fingers with hers (jealous type—doesn’t like the attention on his girlfriend, but too distracted to do anything about it).

“Well, _Maxwell_ ,” the girlfriend intoned, drawing out the last syllable of the name. “This lady’s pretty flattered that you were asked.” She bumped shoulders with her beau, grinning. Former-stutterer relaxed his grip on her hand, and she used the opportunity to slip out of his grasp.

“I’m Cassidy,” she confirmed, “and this is Nick.” She leaned forward across the edge of the planter, offering her hand to Maxwell, which he took. (One or the other of them had sweaty palms, and he’d be willing to bet it wasn’t her). Nick made no move to copy the gesture; Maxwell covered the gap by pushing his glasses up his nose with the back of his wrist. “He’s right, that bow looks worn out, poor thing. You think it’ll still be able to play for us?”

“Oh, sure,” demurred Maxwell, retightening the hairs slowly. (So far so good, gentle small-talk. Girl very calm; man staying taciturn—consistent with stutter, though inconvenient. Time to change that.) “Just a bit of maintenance. Gotta make sure it’s up to snuff for our visitor.” He passed a jaunty wink to Cassidy.

She frowned. “Visitor?” (Definitely not ‘in the know’. Good. Pressure point for Nick.).

“Oh, sorry, are you just back, then?” Maxwell backpedalled. Her frown deepened. “It’s just, Nick said yester—“

“Yeah,” broke in Nick, false confidence in his voice, leaning physically into the conversation in an effort to distract Maxwell. “She’s just back—from her m-mother’s, you know.” He forced an unnatural smile at Cassidy. She tilted her head in confusion, causing Nick to eke out a nervous laugh.

“Um, so… yeah. We’re glad about that, um.” He was faltering fast; his eyes flitted, looking anywhere but at his girlfriend. (Hands trembling—either wants a cigarette, or is horribly nervous about employer—yes, work phone clutched in right hand, knuckles whitened, left hand fisting uselessly. Probably both.) “So! What are you going to play?”

(Amateur distraction technique. Dull.)

Maxwell shrugged. “I don’t know, whatever you’d like. I’ve got a fairly large repertoire; I’ll probably know anything you care to name.”

Nick glanced sideways at his girlfriend. “Do you do any composition?”

Maxwell blinked. “Well, yes, some.”

Cassidy squealed. “Ooh! What do you write? Let us hear!”

Maxwell ducked his chin with a smile, but kept his eyes on Cassidy. (Fashionably dressed: thin, dark jeans, high brown boots, ruffled wine-colored blouse, black crop sweater, high-waisted black puff-coat, large brown mock-leather handbag, no visible labels: doesn’t feel the need to prove class. Liberal politics, to judge by the ‘vintage’ peace sign motif to the jewelry—likely handcrafted, at least in part. She would be the type to go for original work.)

(This was better. Poorly implemented, but an effective distraction. Not completely asinine. Surprising, that.)

“Oh, this and that,” Maxwell prevaricated, dropping his eyes completely. “Some themes, some waltzes, allegros. Whatever I feel in the mood for, really. I’m not very good, but—“

“Nonsense!” cried Cassidy exuberantly. “I’m sure it’s wonderful! Nick told me all about your _Danse Macabre_ yesterday, said it was brilliant!” (The boyfriend knows his violin, then. Interesting.) “Play me… oh, one of your waltzes!”

“Um, sure, okay,” smiled Maxwell, earning a grin from Cassidy. He levered himself to his feet; his periphery caught Nick anxiously checking the time. Maxwell slid his watch up his arm so it wouldn’t interfere with his fingering (four thirty-six) and fitted his violin to his shoulder. “I call this one ‘Night Watchman’.”

(He actually called it the ‘Art History is the Most Vile Form of Torture Ever Invented’ Sonata in G, but that was beside the point. It was one of his early works—opus 16, to be exact—mentally composed during lecture in sixth form and then hastily scribbled over an essay at lunch period. They had been studying ‘The Night Watchman’ that day—the only reason for his off-the-cuff title—but she didn’t need to know that.)

He began to play. Cassidy perched herself on the edge of the planter, gazing rapturously up at the underside of his instrument and swaying in time to the (predictable, plodding) rhythm. (He’d been young when he wrote it, and he was not attempting to embellish or fix. He allowed the music to flow out through sheer muscle memory than with any interpretation on his part, and focused all his attention on Nick.)

With Cassidy distracted, the man had dropped all pretense of calm and had pressed his fisted work phone to his lips. He was visibly trembling—probably dying for a cigarette—and squeezing that phone for all it was worth. His eyes were all but rolling in his head as he fought for something to fixate on, and every few seconds they would flicker across the park to an indeterminate point in the south-east.

(He cursed his lack of knowledge on New York City’s precise layout.)

Maxwell rotated, dreamily, entranced by his own music, until he could look along that sight line too. Nothing but trees that he could see. The waltz lumbered to it’s inevitable, juvenile end.

Silence, but for the wind in the leaves. Nick reached clumsily for his inside pocket (presumably for his cigarettes). Maxwell grinned self-deprecatingly. “I tried to warn you,” he muttered.

“No!” squealed Cassidy. “It was _gorgeous!_ Such depth of _feeling!_ You completely encapsulated the feel of a Night Watchman’s duty! The walking, the waiting, the darkness, the loneliness of the hours; and the overtones of pride and calling to his work; the steadiness of the constant return to the refrain of that low ‘G’—oh!” She clasped her hands together in rapture. “That was sublime!” She beamed up at him from her seat on the edge of the planter. “How long have you been writing like that?”

“Wha—hm?” Maxwell floundered. (He hadn’t been paying attention. Nick, sloppily juggling phone, lighter and cigarette as he lit up, was now pacing tight circles around himself, face pale and anxious, sweat beading freely from his upper lip. His shoulders relaxed infinitesimally as he took his first draw on his menthol—foul. Every turn around the circle he would glance up and to the south again, and then return his gaze to his phone, eyes fixed on the clock read-out.) “Oh, um, about ten years. That one’s one of my earlier pieces.”

“This is one of your _earlier pieces!_ ” she parroted excitedly. “But it’s _gorgeous!_ I can’t believe— “(Ugh, repetition. He could tell who did the talking in this relationship. Nicely matched, stutterer and chatterbox. He tuned her out.)

(Looking to the south, holding phone: whatever his employer is doing that requires a violinist is to the south-south-east of here, on a set time table, likely occurring from 4:30 to 4:45, to judge by increasing levels of agitation. Holding _work_ phone: expecting a call on that line? His perceived focus: dearth of knowledge concerning positioning of items within park—beyond park: Fifth Avenue, Museum Mile—)

“—and here you are, playing street corners, it’s outrageous! To think—“

(Oh!)

“—how you’ve never been discovered before this is a complete mystery to me—“

( _Found_ _you_.)

“—just goes to show the state of the arts in this country—“

(Schonberg: launders property, agents engaged both in theft and replacement of real and fraudulent items. Very upscale organization. Deals with museums; see involvement in False Vermeer case. Need for violinist in Central Park: alibi, or bait-and-switch for the police—very much their modus operandi, that. Violin case can conceal many small objects: gems? No, Natural History Museum wasn’t on the Mile…)

“—violinist of your caliber—“

( _Violinist._ Not just the case—anybody could carry a case—they needed a violinist. A street violinist that no one would miss if they were caught and accused of theft… Of what…? A violin?)

“—even on a subpar instrument like that one—“

(A _violin!)_

“—no offence meant, it was a bit raw, but even still—“

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Museum Mile, New York City. Home of not one but _four_ Stradivari violins, only one of which was on display. Get a man in—infiltration was easy with the right opening—steal any of the others, and if you get caught, have a street artist arrested for the crime.)

“Oh, but that was _wonderful!”_

 _(_ Oh, but that was _wonderful!)_

 “Maxwell!”

Maxwell jolted, and turned a blank gaze down to Cassidy. She smiled gently at him.

“You’ve been standing there in a daze,” she said.

Maxwell blinked twice, rapidly, and flicked his eyes fleetingly over Nick: pacing full out now, drawing too much from the cheap cigarette in his fumbling hands. He understood the anticipation now. He could feel it himself.

“I-I guess I’m just stunned,” he croaked, smiling tightly and ducking his chin again. (He wasn’t built for blushing.) “I’m not used to such… enthusiastic praise.”

(Read: inane babbling. Hardly a valid assessment of his skills. A genuine love of music, yes, but tempered by over-analysis, lack of true artistic insight, and a tendency toward idolization. The state of the arts in this country, indeed.)

Cassidy was instantly contrite. “Oh, I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she cooed solicitously. (If he really had been embarrassed, it would not have helped at all.) “I’m just enthralled by your work! Could you play me another?”

“Eh… sure!” murmured Maxwell, shaking himself a bit. “What would you like to hear?”

“Do you have anything more recent?”

“Well yes, I—“

A phone rang. All three heads in the vicinity snapped upward.

“Nick!” barked Cassidy. “Turn that off! Maxwell is _playing for us!”_

Neither Nick nor Maxwell heard her. Nick’s cigarette dropped to the ground and he scrambled to answer. Maxwell watched his every move.

Cassidy tsked irritably. “ _Men!”_ she cried. “Always so rude! No offense.”

“Gabe? Wh-what’s happened?”

“I did this this morning,” muttered Maxwell distractedly, scooping up his screechy prelude and thrusting it at her. Cassidy reached for it eagerly, with another squeal. (The woman’s enthusiasm was really quite alarming. Nick was listening to this ‘Gabe’; his breaths per minute had increased by more than fifty percent over their earlier baseline.) “S’just a Halloween-y… thing. You know, it coming up on Friday and all that.”

“ _Wha’d’you mean ‘the p-plan’s gone wrong’?!”_ shouted Nick desperately.

Cassidy was entirely captivated, eyes roving over his notes. She was babbling again—he didn’t bother to listen.

“Fuck _,”_ said Nick profoundly, and scrubbed a hand over his face, whirling to face the distant Metropolitan. “ _Fuck!_ They’re on to us, and there’ll b-be squad cars all _over_ the p-park, and then we’ll b-b-both go to p-p-p—“

He cut off. Maxwell could hear Gabe on the other end, chastising Nick in a slick monotone, but he couldn’t make out any words. Probably something about contingency plans—

(He smiled. Infiltration was easy with the right opening.)

Maxwell dropped into a crouch, throwing his beleaguered instrument into its case, not even bothering to properly secure his subpar bow, and scooped up his jacket from the ground. Ignoring Cassidy’s questioning yelps, he walked off the planter’s edge, marched straight up to Nick and ripped the phone out his trembling hands.

“—if I can just get past him, he’ll take the rap for it, and they’ll be none the wiser,” Gabe was saying, voice low and striving for normalcy. (Police very close on his tail, then. Fighting to keep from giving himself away.) “Pay him off if you have to, just get him moving—“

“Hello, Gabe,” interrupted Maxwell. He shrugged off Nick’s flailing hands, tuned out the screeching protestations of both parties and started to run along Nick’s sightline. “I hear you’ve got yourself into a spot of trouble.”

“What the—Who is this? Where’s Nick?”

“Oh, I’d imagine Nick’s back at the planter with his darling Cassidy where I left him,” Maxwell replied in as calm a voice as he could manage whilst running flat out with a violin banging against his knees, juggling coat and phone. Nick’s damnable hands had made the phone slick; it was a fight to keep from dropping it. “He doesn’t strike me as the type to chase after a thief. Not like those police you’ve got on your tail. I’m Maxwell, by the way,” he added, an afterthought.

“Look,” said Gabe, the smooth tenor still oddly calm despite the increased severity of his situation. (Admirable control. This was a professional. Excellent.) “I don’t know who you are, or what you think you know, but you’ll do as I tell you. I want you to turn around, give the phone back to my associate and then we can all go home happy, deal?”

“No,” replied Maxwell, equally reasonably. He wound through unfamiliar paths, allowing his innate sense of direction to guide his every move. (It was still unnerving not to see the path in his head, but he’d picked up many skills in three years of this business.) “Because if I do that, not only will you most likely be arrested for stealing that Stradivarius, but even on the slim chance that you do manage to evade the police, the theft will get pinned on me. If we were to follow _my_ plan, on the other hand, not only will you keep your Strad, but we _both_ get away scott-free. I’m sure you can guess which I find to be the preferable option.”

Silence on the line. Maxwell swerved around a jogging stroller and allowed a grin to creep onto his face. _(Hook, line, and…)_

“Alright, I’m listening,” said Gabe at last. “What’s _your_ plan?”

( _Sinker.)_


	6. Public Image

Saturday, November 15, 2014

 

It was a normal morning at 221b.

So ran the opening line of John’s second book, as it slid noisily out of his printer to complete the cockeyed stack of chapter one. Elena Bertram, John’s publicist, had insisted on his giving a reading of that chapter at the book signing she had roped him into later that day, and John had been fiercely warned to read through it before hand so he wouldn’t stumble over the words in public like an overgrown school boy with an overbite and Harry Potter glasses—her words. Gathering the slim stack of papers in one hand, John slapped them down on the couch, and limped into the kitchen for a fresh cup of tea. He couldn’t help but think, however morose it sounded, how different the two days were, that late July morning three-odd years ago with its manic, nicotine-starved Sherlock, and this foggy November one without him. Somehow, though, they both managed to be perfectly normal.

John had never had what might be called a normal definition of the word normal. Normal, at various points of his life, had been smelling permanently of formaldehyde while dissecting cadavers, or performing minor field surgery in a horizontal rain of bullets and amusing himself by keeping a running commentary on helicopter convoys as they passed overhead. He still remembered days when normal had involved the construction of slap-dash elevators and bridges with Harry, followed by junior first aid when they inevitably failed health and safety. They had both shown shades of their future careers young.

When one’s early experiences of a flat were coloured by the singularity that was Sherlock Holmes, though, normal took on a rather broader meaning than even John’s flexible definition of the term might anywhere else. Still, it was his normal. It had been for nearly five years, after all, and far be it from him to wish for anything else. Sherlock might be gone, and John’s life might not have been quite as rich as it was with him, but he regretted none of it. Even during that terrible month in the immediate aftermath, John had never tried to forget his friend. He had only been so keen to avoid reminders because he was already overwhelmed by the strength of his own memories.

Much of the flat was still just as it had been for five years now, arranged in the same fashion that had always made their more squeamish visitors shy from a closer inspection of the décor. The walls were still covered in dead things. Victor the skull and the bullet-pocked smiley still bracketed the room with their twin garish grins. Papers and case files still slumped carelessly off the desk and coffee table, though they were now more likely to be medical cases than criminal ones. The only notable change to the living areas of the flat was in the absence of the private lab which had once occupied the mal-used table. That had been relocated to Sherlock’s old bedroom, which had resumed its Victorian function as a lumber room and now housed all of Sherlock’s case files, along with John’s records of the exoneration case and an ever-expanding scrapbook of newspaper clippings carefully curated by Mrs. Hudson.

Life, too, went on at much it’s old pace, though with less daring and drama than it once had. John still insisted, with a vehemence that rather weakened his believability, that Sherlock had never managed to _totally_ take over his life. John hadn’t been left entirely at loose ends by Sherlock’s death—only mostly. John still rose at a military five thirty, and showered and dressed with a speed drummed into him by Afghanistan. After that, though, who knew, his days spent writing, or being very unemployed with Mrs. Hudson, or nipping down to Speedy’s with a neighbor, plugging along until something interesting came his way, just as he had always done. He had come by a bit of a reputation at Bart’s for being able to fill in for just about anyone, leg permitting, on a moment’s notice, as evidenced by the current state of the coffee table, temporarily employed in organizing the veritable mountain of papers he’d collected from Stamford’s students during his three days of substitute teaching the previous week.

The bulk of John’s time lately had been taken up with preparations for the release of his latest book. His frankly massive team of editors, Mycroft’s first, and then the publisher’s, had finally cleared his manuscript, after a series of rewrites which had taken most of two months, what with all the interruptions he’d suffered. John was almost sad to see the work go. While still in editing, he at least had a chance of fending off his publicist.

Elena Bertram scared him a little. He wasn’t alone in this; from what John had seen of her staff, she affected everyone that way. She was good at what she did, no doubts there. It was mostly thanks to her influence that he’d garnered what critical accolades he had, especially given that his book didn’t fit particularly well into any recognizable category. Elena had been recommended by his publishers, personally vetted by Mycroft, and was admittedly an invaluable help to John when it came to managing the alarming percentage of the populace who considered themselves his fans. She was also, however, a demanding, obsessive perfectionist, and was often more than a little manic when it came to those things she deemed earth-shatteringly important. Her preoccupation with punctuality and deadlines John could understand, and even admire, however much it made him feel as though he were back in basic training. It was her obsession with his ‘image’, air quotes included, that John could have lived without.

The intellectual side of him knew it was only her job to fuss over such things—she wasn’t called a publicist for nothing, after all—but some other, more wistful part of him couldn’t help but remember Sherlock’s derisive words on the subject of a public image. Neither of them might have been in the business of private-stroke-consulting detection any longer, but that didn’t stop John from feeling uncomfortably like his cover had been blown by the interviews, and the photoshoots, and the God-only-knew-what-else Elena’s scary mind might dream up.

Take his current nightmare. Elena had deemed it necessary, before he had recorded the episode but after his book’s feature on Bookclub had been announced, to proclaim this fact further with large cardboard cutouts of John and the book in the windows of chain bookstores, and to clinch the deal with a signing day at the Waterstone’s on Trafalgar Square. It had been a most unnerving experience, about a week into the ordeal, to find himself being ogled at by the grinning, blank-eyed stare of a two-dimensional version of himself, behind glass at the small Foyle’s branch a few blocks down. It also made it a little harder to go about his life unmolested when passerby were reminded of his face every bookstore they passed. The number of comments he’d received while simply buying the milk was ridiculous.

Once he had recorded the radio four interview, he’d had his every word wrung from him by Elena’s immediate interrogation, only for that to be corroborated by her review of the transcript. John had been duly terrified that she would be angry with him for revealing too much of _Baskerville_ , but that apprehension had been nothing compared to the aura of foreboding which accompanied her feral grin at the news. She’d called him a good boy—John had anticipated a pat on the head, and was disproportionately grateful when none followed—and a reading had been added to his book signing roster.

With an unsuppressed sigh, John laid the chapter down in his lap and reached for his half-drained mug. The assignment wasn’t quite the purgatory it might have been; Elena had promised him no Q&A, since that was the point of the radio show, and no introductory speech at all, once he read the chapter out.

Grimacing at the taste of his now-tepid tea, John pushed himself to his feet, and set off for the kitchen, mug and manuscript in hand. He knew, without bothering to check his watch, that it was getting to be time to leave, if he didn’t want to face Elena’s wrath. Just as he emptied his mug and deposited it in the sink, though, he heard the little thuds of Mrs. Hudson’s feet on the stairs, and her customary chirp at the door.

“You’ve a car, John, dear!” Mrs. Hudson called, still tiptoeing through the door after two and a half years of guaranteed non-toxicity. She stopped, barely in the room, and stared with suppressed disapproval around the flat. “Oh, look what you’ve done to the place,” she sighed. “It was perfectly fine last month. You know, there’s times you’re just as bad as he ever was!”

John threw a rueful grin at her, wringing his hands dry in the dishtowel and copying her pointed glance at his kitchen table. The evidence of his long-ago breakfast sat congealing, crammed in around his paperwork on the poor, overwhelmed table, the jam jar perched atop one particularly precarious stack. The table, in the absence of Sherlock’s scientific explorations, had been turned over to John’s publishing endeavors and was, if anything, more of a mess than it was before. Once this hellish book launch was over, he’d make a good clean sweep of it all.

“I know,” sighed John exasperatedly, throwing up his hands in mock defeat. He tossed down the towel and leant across the mess toward where he’d abandoned his chapter, reaching for the little stack of papers. “Lately everything’s just been a bit… ah—! _Jesus_!” He had leaned a touch too far, and his leg suddenly seized. He slipped, his hand followed, and a magnificent cascade of papers slid spectacularly to the floor. “Sod this, I give up. Get me to a convent.”

“John,” Mrs. Hudson admonished, trying to be stern and failing utterly, doing her best not to look too amused. “You’ll clean it properly, when you’ve the time. But don’t do it now!  Your driver seems most impatient.”

“Well, too bad for him. I wasn’t expecting a pick up,” John muttered irritably, hand pressed deep to his rebellious muscle, more upset by the mess than his unexpected taxi. Elena the micromanager at work again, he supposed. He really shouldn’t have been surprised. This mess on the floor, though, was the straw to the camel’s back. He limped around the table and knelt uncomfortably, pawing through the pile on the floor. He frowned up at Mrs. Hudson. “And anyway, he’s being paid for his time, isn’t he?”

Mrs. Hudson, decidedly amused now, leaned casually on one of the glass dividers between kitchen and sitting room, content to watch. “He seems more worried about you being late, to be honest.”

John had so far only succeeded in spreading the mess. He was more than willing to leave it for later—much later—save for his printed chapter; he didn’t want to dwell on what Elena might say if he didn’t bring it. “What kind of cabbie worries about—aha!Of course, it would be at the bottom, wouldn’t it?”

“Of course, dear, it’s the way these things work. And it’s not a taxi, didn’t I mention? You’ve a car.”

John froze, his triumphantly raised chapter hanging uselessly in midair. “Oh hell, it’s not one of Mycroft’s, is it?”

Mrs. Hudson shook her head, eyes wide and innocuous. “Oh, no, I shouldn’t think so. Wrong color, for a start. Sort of powdery blue?”

“Well thank goodness,” John declared. “A surprise kidnapping is the _last_ thing I need this morning.” Manuscript firmly in hand again, he levered himself off the floor, and stood crookedly, leaning on the back of a chair. He was usually able to navigate the flat without using his cane, but unexpected twinges like that still threw him off.  He indicated the door with a silent nod, and held out a hand. Mrs. Hudson nodded; she knew just what he was after. “I’ll be back ‘round four,” he told her back as she rummaged for his cane behind the door. “More Doctor Who tonight?”

“Oh, I’d love to,” she said, returning, cane in hand, “but I’m off to my sister’s this afternoon, remember?”

“Ah, that’s right! Your niece’s birthday.” He collected his cane from her, and pressed a kiss to her cheek. “This is goodbye then. I’m off to face my rabid public.”

Mrs. Hudson chuckled, and preceded him out to the landing. “Enjoy, dear!” she shouted up the stairs as she descended. “See you next week!”

“Take care, Mrs. H!”

John slithered into his jacket, chapter one held firmly in his teeth, and clomped down the stairs. Just as Mrs. Hudson had said, there was a tiny, pale blue, very non-Mycroft-looking car idling at the kerb, and an agitated-looking, pimply teenager awaiting him on the stoop.

“Mr. Watson?” said the boy, positively radiating tension and excitement. “I can’t even tell you—I work for Mz. Bertram—I can’t believe this _—_ Um, we should—be going? Um…“

John blinked at him. The boy, flat-chested and slouched into his suit even though it fit fairly well, cracked a sheepish smile.

“It’s Doctor Watson,” John said finally, emphasizing the title. “But, please, call me John. Who did you say you were, again?”

The child blushed spectacularly. “Oh, sorry, Mr— _Doctor!_ Watso _—_ John,” he finally settled, letting out a high-pitched giggle of pure nerves. “I’m, um, Ronny—Ronald, that is, um, Adair. I’m Mz. Bertram’s new intern, um—“

“Right,” said John, cutting the boy off before he could babble his way into embarrassment yet again. Well there were no doubts about his honesty at least; Elena made all her underlings call her ‘Mz.’. “She’s sent you to collect me, is that it?”

“Uh, yes, she did?” said Ronny, grinning apologetically, the ends of his sentences trailing up into questions with irritating persistence. The boy tossed his perfectly coiffed fringe from his eyes with an unnatural-looking slantways fling. John’s neck hurt just looking at it. “She seemed to think that you’d, um, benefit from private transportation…? For the crowds? And, I think, she wanted to manage that… for… you?”

John tsked loudly, shaking his head. “That woman doesn’t trust me at all.”

“Me, neither,” admitted Ronny with another of those giggles. Then he froze, looking suddenly mortified. “Oh… god… That… wasn’t the impression I wanted to make.” He straightened himself up so quickly that John nearly snapped to attention too, half expecting a salute.

“Dr. Watson?” a magically mature young man asked, seeming unaccountably older, however much he might have kept the spots. “Mz. Bertram asked me to remind you to read through chapter one before you have to do so aloud, but I see you have it with you, so I’ll assume that you have done so?” At John’s bemused nod, he continued. “And, sorry, but we really should be going… She’ll have my hide if you’re late…”

John just raised his eyebrows at the boy, who still stood motionless on the stoop. He took an obvious side step toward the car, flashing his papers in an obvious invitation to _get on with it_.

“Oh! Right, yes!” yelped Ronny, galvanized into action, as he suddenly lurched toward the car. John followed more slowly, with a half indulgent, half exasperated shake of his head. He pulled at the backseat door handle, and found it locked.

 _Honestly._ Tapping his fingertips idly on the glass, John rolled his eyes toward the sky. He caught on an oddity half way up, and he flicked his attention back down to it in surprise.

There was a shape at the window of the empty house across the street. The figure huddled close to the sill, backlit by the room’s ambient glow against the grey of a London morning. He squinted up at it all the same, the motion pulling his face into a funny, thoughtless smile. It looked like Seamus was back.

Ronny finally got the point, and John’s door popped open. He slid into the back seat of the car, and settled his manuscript beside him, still eyeing the lit windows of the house across the street. Seamus was John’s closest neighbor, in terms of acquaintance, rather than geography, and it had been two months since they’d seen each other. As the car lurched out into traffic, John fumbled his phone out of a pocket and tapped out a clumsy text.

For all that he had grown accustomed to texting through Sherlock’s love affair with the medium, John had never quite got the hang of it. Technologically challenged, he believed the saying went. It would have been quicker to simply ask if Seamus was back in London, but John couldn’t resist ribbing his neighbor a little. As it was, the car had managed to get caught in some minor mid-morning traffic tangle within a blocks of 221, so at the very least, the extra time was put to some use. Tuning out Ronny’s agitated muttering at the other drivers, John sent:

 _That you at the_  
window or is Mrs C  
taking lessons from  
Mrs H in the not  
your housekeeper  
department?

The response arrived far quicker than it would have had John been the one typing it.

 _Nope, it’s me. I am_  
back on this side  
of the pond, as it  
were.

John was four words into his response when a question mark arrived from Seamus. John rolled his eyes and continued typing. He had forgotten how impatient Seamus could get. Even Sherlock hadn’t been that bad. He eventually got out:

_Where were you  
again? Brazil?_

_Argentina. Why, do_  
you know something  
you’re not telling?

Came the reply, almost immediately. And wasn’t that Seamus all over? The man was a suspicious bastard, and far too nosy for his own good, but it amused John more than it bothered him, so he let it slide. From the irritability, though, John suspected he had not got what he was after in Argentina. John had picked up a few things from Sherlock, after all.

_Bird?_

asked John simply, restricting himself to the quicker, shorter texts, as he had once done with Sherlock. Seamus was former Royal Army, too, having been a sniper in Iraq, and had turned naturalist after his discharge. He was often out of the country, chasing down his particular bird with his tagging gun, whenever one of his spotters caught sight of it. This time, as was often the case, he appeared not to have been lucky. And, indeed

_No_

replied Seamus.

_Ouch_

Seamus wasn’t happy, certainly, but a no-sighting trip left him in a much less foul mood than the alternative. Three times over the period John had known him, and apparently once again before, Seamus had managed to get a sight on his bird, and a confirmed identification, but had been unable to tag it. The species evidently produced slippery little things, and Seamus managed to bear them a decidedly personal grudge.

 _If you fancy_  
sandwiches I’ll tell  
you the whole sad  
story. 

_Sandwiches?_

Queried John. It was low key for Seamus, who was more fond of a pint than a mug of coffee, however game he always was to swap a good war story down at Speedy’s.  John had a sneaky suspicion that those two wasted months in Argentina had tired Seamus out more than they’d angered him. John was the man’s only real life social outlet, after all. As far as John knew, all Seamus’ other associates and acquaintances—he didn’t dare go so far as to say ‘friends’—only had contact with him over the internet. Maybe he simply needed human contact.

_A man’s got to eat  
1230 good?_

_1230s good_  
tomorrow.  
booksigning  
today

John hazarded a glance at the rear view mirror, which showed Ronny all but praying, fidgeting feverishly as he checked his watch against his phone and the clock on the car’s dash. They had progressed a few blocks, but were still prodigiously stuck. Seamus’ reply pushed all thoughts of Ronny’s impending Elena-induced doom out of his mind.

 _Lookit you, famous_  
authorman!  
Tomorrows no good  
for me, I have stuff  
I need to do

Well, John could well imagine, having been out of the country two months.

_Monday then?_

he asked, more for confirmation than anything. Seamus, he knew, lived much like him: plugging along until something turned up that needed doing. It was the main reason they saw so much of each other

_Monday 1230  
Speedys it is _

Nodding once to cement the time in his mind, John returned his phone to his pocket, and sat back into the seat. The traffic hadn’t cleared at all while he had been talking with Seamus, but they were now only minutes away from Trafalgar Square, if their current snailish pace held. John hadn’t noticed the progress, intent as he’d been on his typing. He could never be like Mycroft’s assistant—whom he now knew alternately as Anthea, Daria, Charisse and Marie—who would have been able to hold two texting conversations in English and Finnish, while sending emails in Swahili and playing Words With Friends in Yiddish, all while remaining completely aware of where they were and how fast they were going. John should know, he’d seen her do it.

They crept along quietly for a few minutes, John staring out the window to avoid staring at his driver. Now that they’d got within walking distance if need be, Ronny had stopped looking like a man awaiting the gallows and had started sneaking little glances back at John through the rear view mirror, as though he wouldn’t notice. Admittedly, John hadn’t for a while, but once he had finished his conversation with Seamus, the staring became very obvious, very quickly. John lasted through about four rounds of it before he’d finally had enough. He knew what those kinds of stares usually lead to, and he dreaded it as much as he wanted it over with.

“There something wrong?” he asked, tone very deliberate and just on this side of drawling, torn between reluctance and impatience.

“N-no!” squeaked Ronny, self-conscious at having been caught, and refocused his eyes firmly on the car before him. It was less than five seconds before he lost his resolve. His eyes flicked glowingly to John’s, and a wave of words came spilling out. “I just—I’m sorry, Dr. Watson, I know you don’t like fans going nuts over you, but I just have to say, you have been _such_ an inspiration to me. I used to follow your blog, you know? Before? And the way you never lost hope just… Well, it gave me such _ideas_ , you know? About what’s possible?” He glanced expectantly back at John through the mirror.

“Ah,” was all John said.

That was his biggest problem with his fans. Ronny was right, he didn’t like fans going nuts over him, but that was more due to a lingering thought that he wasn’t all that interesting, and a definite feeling that there were other, better things they could be doing with their time. What truly disturbed him was this constant expression of surprise at his trust in Sherlock. People were ever coming up to him, expostulating over their amazement at his steadfastness, his faith, his willingness to stand up for his beliefs in the face of such seemingly insurmountable evidence.

John hated it. He’d gotten better about taking it over time—he’d nearly decked a reporter of such sentiments coming out of the exoneration trial just after the verdict was handed down, and his one and only attempt at a relationship in the past going-on three years had ended forty five minutes into the third date when the subject reared its head—but it still rankled horribly, and wasn’t likely to endear him to anyone fast. He couldn’t understand how people could find his friendship so startling. It was nothing special, only basic human decency. Of course he had never believed the lies. Friends protected people. The insinuation that he couldn’t have, or shouldn’t have, was nothing short of insulting.

The hapless Ronny, of course, had no idea of any of this, and so continued.

“You’re the reason I took this internship, because I’ve decided I want to be a writer, like you, and I thought, if John Watson approves of Mz. Bertram, then that’s where I’ll start. And to finally, actually meet you? It’s a dream for me; I keep pinching myself, you know? Because you’re _you_ and you’re in my _car_! And you probably have no concept of how cool that is, because, well, you’re _yourself_ , so, you know… You’re used to it. And you’re going to be reading _Hounds,_ which is completely awesome. That was the first case I ever read on your blog, before I went through the backlogs, you know, so I have a soft spot for it, and I—“ He finally caught sight of John’s stony expression in the mirror, and faltered. “Sorry, I’ll shut up now.”

John pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows, and stared out the window. He said nothing.

They drove in heavy silence for a bit, pushing through the blocks slightly faster now as they approached their destination. Ronny had completely stopped panicking over the time, and kept his eyes faithfully on the road, though they were decidedly behind schedule. Though he didn’t look away from the window, John could feel the pressure of another fannish outburst growing in the air, and was loath to poke this one open. In the end, he didn’t have to. Pulling to a stop at a red light, just two blocks from the square, Ronny passed him another sneaky glance through the mirror.

“Would you do something for me, though?” he exploded suddenly, actually turning part way round in his seat to face John. John idly blinked in his direction, eyebrows rising again.  Ronny grimaced expressively, eyes pleading already. “I’m loving it, don’t get me wrong, but I know Mz. Bertram, she’s not going to let me get through with everybody else when you’re signing the books, so…” He raised a beautiful hardcover copy of _Adventures_ from the seat beside him, and waggled it enticingly. It looked like the special edition.

“Would you mind?” he instructed more than asked, thrusting the book at John. “Here, I’ve got a pen…”

John sighed and accepted both the book and the pen handed over a second behind it. After all, the kid had saved him a cab fare, and if he hadn’t killed them yet, he wasn’t likely to with a block and change to go. Why not humour him? It’d put Elena in a good mood.

“Your light’s changed,” prodded John, nodding toward the windscreen as he settled the book on his knees. They lurched forward. His own name stared up at him, shiny and mostly free from fingerprints, and the cover cracked loudly as he opened it. John frowned at the book; it had clearly never been opened. “I thought you said you were a fan,” he said reproachfully, paging forward to the dedication leaf.

“Oh, I am,” Ronny protested emphatically as John looped his name into the book without really looking at it. “I run a website and everything—that’s another thing I got from you—But, well… My real copy’s a little like my baby, it’s a little embarrassing… I didn’t think you’d want to sign it…”

John leaned forward to settle the first book back on the seat from whence it came. They turned into a thin alley just behind Waterstone’s, and his eye caught on a woman in pinstripes, waiting on a set of loading stairs about a hundred meters in front of them. “Oh, go on,” he sighed good-naturedly, grinning. “I’ll do both. But hurry up and give it here, Elena looks peeved.”

Ronny jumped, both at the offer and at the sight of Elena. She did, indeed, look peeved, arms crossed tightly over her ruffly blouse and tracking their car like a hawk.

“Oh. Oh, _damn_ ,” muttered Ronny distractedly as he pulled up to her, rummaging one-handedly through the messenger bag on the passenger seat floor. He passed back his other book—this a crinkled softback edition—without even looking at him. “Thank you! But damn, she’s going to kill me!”

John, for his part, was less worried about Elena’s murderous instincts than he was in abject astonishment at the book in his lap. It was _mutilated_ , cover art worn away to cardstock, spine cracked in multiple places, the pages marked with hundreds of little coloured tabs. John turned a few pages deep in the book as quickly as he dared, feeling as though the thing would fall apart at the slightest provocation; the inside was colourful too, marked all over with many colours of highlighter and emphatic circlings and underlinings in ballpoint.

It was terrifying. It looked like the Bible he and Sherlock in the hotel room of a murder suspect, one Enoch Drebber, an American preaching an oddly fanatical form of Christianity that really didn’t fit his predilection for polygyny. John paged through to the dedication, blinking in surprise. On the inside of the fly leaf, there were numerous web addresses inked in a left-slanting hand, all of them with names indicative of fan groups, including John’s blog and the book’s official page. John’s dedication on the facing page had been highlighted in purple and circled three times in blue marker.

 _Dear Ronny_ , John considered writing, _You’re an okay kid. Bit creepy, but okay. Get a life._ He settled for scrawling his name below the dedication, snagging his chapter and his cane from the seats beside him, and sliding out of the car.

Elena Bertram, all bleached blonde, four foot, eleven-and-three-quarters inches of her, had stomped down the stairs and was already castigating Ronny. At John’s approach, she smiled widely.

“John, you’re here, how are you?” she purred pleasantly, and re-rounded on Ronny without waiting for his reply. “You, young man, promised him here five and a quarter minutes ago. He’s on in eight and some minutes!” Ronny’s mouth was hanging open, ready at any moment to speak, but Elena never gave him the chance. “I _know_ the traffic was awful—I don’t want to hear it. Why do you think all those cars are out on the streets, anyway? I’ve got nine hundred people crawling about in there like maggots in a baitbox, and one measly intern doing a very bad job of organizing them. In thirty seconds, I want to have _two_ measly interns doing a very bad job of organizing them, hopefully into some semblance of workable order before I get done with John here and wind up putting those ducks in a row myself. Now get!” Ronny scrambled up the stairs and was nearly inside the back door, as she shouted after him, “And I do mean literally, I want them in a full on, switch backed NHS _queue_ , not in a mush!”

“Yes, Mz. Bertram!” yelped Ronny’s retreating voice, and he was gone.

“You’re in fine form this morning, Elena,” greeted John amusedly, flexing the hand on his cane. “Is all that traffic really for me?”

“Of course not, you know central London,” she said, waving a hand dismissively, following the line of Ronny’s retreat with her eyes. “And I’m always in fine form.” She finally looked straight at John, only to pass him a squinty glance out of the corner of her eye. “Did he jump you with that alarmingly biblicized tome of his?”

He grinned tightly and pointedly at her. _“Yes.”_

“Damn him, I told him not to do that! I specifically warned him—“ Elena tsked irritably, tossing her head in a single, sharp shake, curls bouncing wildly. She turned apologetic eyes to John. “I wasn’t even going to have him here today, I know how you are about the overzealous ones, and contrary to appearances, I do try to keep you happy.”

John’s bemused smile never wavered. “When it suits you, you mean,” he agreed.

“Well,” demurred Elena, wiggling her shoulders saucily. “Woman’s prerogative, and all that. Come on, we’ve got to go.” She yanked at his free hand and darted away up the stairs and into the back of the bookstore. “He volunteered anyway, and you didn’t actually _want_ to pay for a cab, did you?” she shouted back over her shoulder.

“No,” said John, following at a more sedate, syncopated pace, “Though I’d have trusted them more not to kill me on the way.”

“Please,” groaned Elena loudly, her whole head thrown back as she rolled her eyes to the ceiling, wending her way through stacks of book boxes in the store’s back rooms. “I wasn’t worried about that. He idolizes you too much to pull anything stupid with you in his charge. He probably drove like a saint, the little creep.” They emerged from the storage area into a wider, carpeted hallway, and John fell into step with her. Her height and heels made him more than able to match her strides, even with his limp. “I’m sure that’s the real reason he’s so late,” she continued more conversationally. “He’s usually much more reliable. He’s just a complete a fool about you.”

“Thus why you didn’t want him around today,” teased John. “The truth comes out.”

“That’s not the only reason, but it’s a part of it, I will admit,” she granted, turning a sharp corner. “He begged me, though, and it takes a deal to push him to that. He’s the Minister for Culture’s youngest, and you can _tell_ —or you can when _you_ haven’t turned him into a top contender for the title of upper class twit of the year.” They came to a stop, finally, just before an anonymous double door at the very end of their hall. Elena leant against the wall to one side of the passage, and John mirrored her. “And I wasn’t going to say no so some extra help, now was I? Have you seen the amount of people you’ve got out there? And you always manage to attract the really puppy-eager fans. Seriously, you’d think we were a religion!”

“Okay, not really helping here, Elena,” said John, dubious. Indeed, now that they were closer, John could hear the dull roar of anticipation from the fans awaiting him. He twitched his lips into a momentary grimace.

“Oh, come off it, you’ll be fine,” laughed Elena. “All you do is sit back here until I whip those over-excitable cheerleaders into shape and shut them up, then the manager and I will introduce you, and you go out there and read your stuff, and then you sign books and smile for pictures until your hand falls off or your face gets stuck that way or you run out of customers, whichever comes first. Got it?” She didn’t wait for John to nod. “Good. And you read the chapter? Do it again. I’ll be back in a tick.”

She was gone, sliding out the double door in such a way that John saw none of the crowd outside. “Oi!” came her voice, shouting over the din, but muffled by the distance and the door. “If you lot ever want to meet Dr. Watson, you’ll zip your lips and listen to the interns!”

John didn’t read his chapter. He just stayed propped up by the door, hand clenching the papers tight and crinkling them horribly, mind purposefully blank and letting the hubbub wash over him. He breathed, and didn’t loosen his tie.

Elena’s head popped back round the door. “We’re ready, Johnny,” she said. She always called him Johnny when she was trying to be supportive. It never really worked. “Lets go.”

From his first step beyond the door, limping in Elena’s petite shadow with a smile plastered all over his face, the crowd’s gentle murmuring exploded into a harsh cacophony of cheers and whistling, claps and cries and calls of his name. John ignored it, smiling inanely, and made for the mic-ed podium with the covered table beside it.

A hush fell over the crowd. He took in the massive throng of featureless faces, the sea of deerstalker hats and blue scarves; Ronny at the door, clutching that dog-eared book of his to his chest, his face lit up like a Christmas tree; Elena, standing by the Waterstone’s manager now, eyes growing more manic each moment he didn’t speak; and just at the back, the massive display of the cover of his book, with the words _The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,_ and _John Watson,_ bracketing an old candid that John had never known was taken, unearthed from Greg’s cameraphone by a nosy art team, just John and Sherlock, the pair of them, leaning over evidence and grinning wide.

John cleared his throat, and began.

“ _It was a normal morning at 221b.”_


End file.
